It's been many many years since I built a rod, but I used to get by with a zero cost wrapper. I cut a couple of notches in a shoe box to support the blank, then placed the spool of thread in a small box so it could freespool and not go anywhere. Then I ran the thread through the pages of a large book en route to the blank to apply tension. Tension was easily adjusted by the number of pages on top of the thread.

Worked perfectly. I'm still fishing with an Orvis that I built that way.